Oldal 94 [94]
92 | THe Puitosopny or Eco-Pouirics
effective counter-measure to any attempt to anthropomorphise nature,
including those which claim to perceive the measure of good in nature
(in the immeasurable).”
Merleau-Ponty himself was prevented by death from accounting for
the ethical consequences of the ontological turn he had carried out.
However, Emmanuel Lévinas, his contemporary, bases his own radical
ethics of responsibility on many similar presuppositions. Here too, the
starting point is the body, with the difference that for Lévinas, the basic
bodily connection with the world is not sensing but feeding. Above all
else, man lives from the world, makes it his own and identifies with it.
He is only forced to differentiate between himself and others, when he
is called by the Other. A new meaning is revealed in the speech of the
Other. It resists all attempts to trace it back to the familiar. This is what
Lévinas means by the statement that only another human being can be
an absolute stranger. “The presence of the Other is equivalent to this
calling into question of my joyous possession of the world. (...) To speak
is to make the world common...”, he writes in Totality and Infinity.*°
‘The Other is infinite, ie., transcendent, because its identity cannot be
the object of the dialogue which aims to grasp meaning (force things
within limits), since its starting point is exactly the encounter of the two
of us. I am speaking not of him but to him; I am seeking to understand
not something but someone. “...the comprehension of being in general
cannot dominate the relationship with the Other. The latter relationship
” "The meaning of the quoted metaphor (being speaks through us) is, however, opaque.
During his further inquiries, Toadvine develops the question: if the meaning that gains
expression through language is not given to the world by the subject, but is rather
achieved by life with the mediation of the sensing body and squeezed out of the pre¬
existing things, as claim the ecophilosophers who appeal to Merleau-Ponty, what then is
the ontological status of the expression? What can be the motive of the process during
which meaning is placed from one medium (nature) to the other (expression)? He
concludes that this supposed dialogue between the living being and some kind of external
world simply does not exist. The act of sensing cannot be deduced. “Sense is ontologically
more primordial than either a sense-bestowing subject, or a sense-carrying substance,
more basic than the poles of life and world themselves. It is the pure event from which
the two orders of subject and object, or the two series of causality and intentionality split
off, (...) ...sense is rather a happening, an event of radical creation, a vortex of self¬
reflective movement whose ongoing rupture throws off questioner and questioned, subject
and object, body and thing, as so many by-products of its fission.” (Ted Toadvine: Singing
the World in a New Key. Janus Head 7.2. 2004, pp. 279-80.) Toadvine’s final conclusion is
that it is not only philosophy that begins with questioning and the wonder that leads to
it, but nature as well.
80 Emmanuel Lévinas: Totality and Infinity, pp.75-76. Martins Nijhoff Publishers, The
Hague, 1979.